Massive dust storms hit southeast Colorado, evoking "Dirty Thirties"

John and Jane Stulp witnessed this massive dust storm approaching their farm near Lamar. Seven such storms have hit the area since November. (Jane Stulp, Special to The Denver Post)

LAMAR — Jillane Hixson stopped dusting her home about noon on a clear Friday and looked out the window to a storm roiling in the distance.

Small dust devils kicked up, and within moments, a punishing dust storm slammed into Hixson Farms at full force, trapping Hixson and her husband, Dave Tzilkowski, in their home for 15 hours to kick off the Memorial Day weekend.

"You hear sand and dirt pounding against the window," said Hixson, a fifth-generation farmer whose land and home are 4 miles south of Lamar. "You know that it's your crop that's hitting the windows and blowing away, and it's not just affecting you, but also everyone else."

They raced to close the blinds and curtains — to minimize the thick fog of dirt seeping inside and to block the grim vision.

Dave Tzilkowski and his wife, Jillane Hixson, look out over their farm from their backyard. Their crop of wheat was damaged by the recent dust storm. "You hear sand and dirt pounding against the window," said Hixson, a fifth-generation farmer whose property is 4 miles south of Lamar. "You know that it's your crop that's hitting the windows and blowing away, and it's not just affecting you, but also everyone else." (Hyoung Chang, The Denver Post)

"You can't stand to look at it," she said. "It's like a train wreck, looking a disaster full in the face."

They paced and they prayed as 60 mph winds kept coming.

"At one point, the sand was pounding on the glass so hard, I didn't know if it was hail or dirt," she said.

By late evening, so much dirt was floating inside the house, they had to cover their faces with handkerchiefs.

"It was in your nose, on your tongue, in your eyes," she said.

Hixson showered late that night but soon was covered with another layer of grime. They went to bed at 11 p.m., putting their heads under the blankets to shield them from the noise and the dirt, but they couldn't really sleep. They moved from bedroom to bedroom trying to find some peace.

By the time they woke at 6 a.m. Saturday, the storm had passed.

They opened the front door and saw 3-foot drifts of dirt everywhere.

"We were shellshocked, almost immobilized by depression," she said. "We were overwhelmed by the huge financial loss, and by the physical and emotional stress."

Their spirits lifted when family from Denver arrived for the holiday weekend.

It took two days for the entire extended family, with the help of two tractors and a loader, to clear the fine brown grit.

A thick layer of dust covers a table inside Jillane Hixson's home, south of Lamar, in the wake of a recent dust storm. (Jillane Hixson, Special to The Denver Post)

The storm was the worst of seven that have scoured the farm since November, Hixson said.

"We had periods of blowing soils in the 1970s that required tractor work," Tzilkowski said. "But this is ridiculous. I've never seen anything like it."

Dirt is almost all that people can talk about these days in communities along U.S. 50 and 287.

Photos of fierce dust storms rolling across the state's Eastern Plains are showing up on Facebook and local TV news, harking to the Dust Bowl years that devastated southeastern Colorado in the 1930s. Farmers and ranchers are tolling their losses. People are praying for rain.

It's the inevitable result of three seasons of extreme drought in the area — D4 this year, the worst on the U.S. Drought Monitor scale, and no relief in sight, said state climatologist Nolan Doesken.

"The first year, it was very dry, but there was still reasonable vegetative cover," he said. "That started deteriorating last year, with more and more bare ground."

For miles on either side of U.S. 287 between Kit Carson and Lamar, the earth is brown and bare during a season that should be bursting with green native grasses and wheat. Even weeds aren't growing. Failed crops mean vast swaths of land with no roots to anchor parched topsoil.

"(Farmers and ranchers) are watching the clouds gather, and then they get nothing but dust storms," Doesken said. "It's very depressing."

The conditions are taxing the financial ledgers and the creativity of people who make their living from the land.

On Wednesday at Hixson Farms, where 800 acres of wheat are already lost, workers were spreading 25 tons of manure to preserve topsoil on the 200 acres that were blowing the worst. It cost about $30,000 — and it's just a gamble, because high winds may blow it all away.

They've already chiseled the land, creating big, heavy clods, but doing that often just removes more moisture from the soil.

"This is highly erodible land," said Don Turner, a crop-insurance agent who dropped by the farm that afternoon. "(2002) was a year like this, but you didn't have all the dirt blowing."

Dust storms are new to people like Tarah Damgaard, a nurse who lives in Manzanola, about 70 miles west of Lamar. On Monday night, she was visiting family in Pueblo when she heard a news report about a "huge dust storm" coming their way.

"My mother-in-law looked out the window and said, 'Oh, my gosh, it looks like fire.' I looked, and it was like smoke, high in the sky, rolling toward us."

Damgaard immediately rushed her kids into the car and headed for home — but they ended up in the middle of the storm.

"It (passed) over my car," she said. "I couldn't see 5 feet in front of me."

She drove very slowly. When she pulled up at the house, she and the kids covered their faces with their shirts and ran inside.

"It was the most amazing and terrifying thing I've seen in a long time," she said, "and I hope I never see it again."

The next day, many of her elderly patients talked about it.

"They said it reminded them of how bad it was during the Dust Bowl," she said.

Turner has heard many similar stories, having grown up on a nearby farm listening to his parents' stories of the "Dirty Thirties." He remembers the drought that devastated the Eastern Plains during his childhood in the 1950s.

One particular dust storm is forever burned into his memory.

"It started on March 15, 1954, and went solid for three days and three nights," he said.

Turner travels frequently through drought-stricken counties, including Baca and Prowers, assessing the damage for insurance claims.

"It's a wasteland," he said, standing in a vast field of crumbling dirt Wednesday afternoon. "There should be cows here. And tractors."

It's like the silent spring, empty and eerie. Hardly a tractor in sight, as far as the eye can see. No one laboring to prepare for the wheat harvest. No cattle grazing, because the grasses have gone dormant and ranchers are selling off their herds or trucking them elsewhere.

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